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Which easy-to-handle software would you recommend me for creating energy level diagrams? What do you use and what is your experience? I'm recently working on my bachelor thesis and I would like to add some pictures to ilustrate Hund rules, Zeeman splitting, crystal field splitting and so on with option to customize them on my own. Cheers!

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    $\begingroup$ I'm not sure this is within the scope of this site. The software you describe doesn't appear to be as much computational as graphical in nature, and you appear to be asking for recommendations rather than something more how-to with a specific library or package. As a general advice you might investigate how others did the diagrams in the literature you are most familiar with. $\endgroup$
    – hardmath
    Jul 16, 2013 at 19:49
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    $\begingroup$ I use matplotlib for everything. $\endgroup$ Jul 18, 2013 at 21:51

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If you are familiar with LaTeX (and I can only recommend it to use it to write your bachelor thesis), you can try out PGF and TikZ. You can find an example for energy level diagrams in TikZ here.

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  • $\begingroup$ TikZ has quite a learning curve if you're after complex diagrams. But I think it's time well invested. $\endgroup$
    – AlexE
    Aug 22, 2013 at 8:51
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ChemDraw is a proprietary package that gives you easy access to renderings of orbitals, which can be useful here, but I do not recommend this.

I draw lots of simple figures in OpenOffice (free and portable) in the ODG format and save as PDF.

If you want to have orbitals to go along with your figures, then you should post a new question on orbital rendering programs because that is not within the scope of the question here.

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Depending on what you want to show, the matplotlib library for python may also be a good solution. In particular, I would like to direct you to the hlines function and this article on annotating your plots.

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